Yahoo Killing Maps, Pipes & More

alphadogg writes: Yahoo is shutting down its mapping service, Pipes and reducing the availability of Yahoo TV and Yahoo Music. The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content. "We made this decision to better align resources to Yahoo's priorities as our business has evolved since we first launched Yahoo Maps eight years ago," says the company.

Comments

Re:It's going to be painful...

[binarylarry]

Google is still run by the founders and early advisors.

Re:It's going to be painful...

[ron_ivi]

MBA's took over too fast at Yahoo after the founders took their money and ran...

Even a bit worse than that --- after they watched AOL buy Time Warner they wanted to emulate that they hired some Warner Brothers guy as their CEO who didn't know much about the internet. And they never invest in the technologies they have. Consider all the times they aquired the leading company in a space --- only to *not* invest in it and kill it:

• Broadcast.com - that Yahoo bought for ~$4 billion - was the leading audio/video site of its time, and could have been Youtube + Hulu + Netflix
• Geocities.com - that Yahoo bought for ~3 billion - was the leading social network of its time - could have been MySpace+Facebook
• Egroups - for a half a billion - another social network component.
• del.icio.us - another social network component
• Altavista as part of Overture - that Yahoo bought for i-forget-how-much - was the leading search engine of it's time - and yahoo doesn't even use them, preferring to pay competitors for search results.
• MusicMatch - that coulda been Pandora.

And such irony that they *now* descide to focus on Search --- after having bought what was once the best search engine on the internet (AltaVista), yet have since then been paying competitors to do search for them.

Re:It's going to be painful...

[mrchaotica]

Not to mention, that "Pipes" thing actually looks pretty cool... too bad they never marketed it, so I didn't know it existed until after they decided to shut it down!